The Skin     by Curzio Malaparte, Translated by D. Moore Original title: La pelle Original language: Italian Published by Marlboro Press, Inc., The Pub. Date: 1988 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 8.28 x 1.03 x 5.54 ISBN: 0910395373 List Price: $12.95, £8.23 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.23 Published by Northwestern University Press Pub. Date: October 1997 Format: Paperback, 274 pages Dimensions: 1.00 x 8.25 x 5.25 in. ISBN: 0810115727 List Price: $21.00, £17.50 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £17.50 Published by Picador Pub. Date: 1952 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback Not available for ordering

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This novel gives a truthful account of the spiritual condition of a liberated but defeated Europe, documenting the mood of nihilism, the moral dissolution and the existential nausea of a conquered people. History intertwines with narrative against the backdrop of Naples, a city in despair, gripped by the plague which coincided with the arrival of the Allied forces in October 1943. The city is portrayed as a place of degradation and degeneracy, condemned to a corruption that touches and contaminates everything. The powerless masses on its streets are a hungry mob fighting to survive through illegal trafficking and the open prostitution of women and children, a macabre spectacle of humiliation.


This is an outstanding, morally accurate depiction of the Italian people in the aftermath of a lost war, the lugubrious sum of their indignities exposed to the disdainful gaze of the victors.


Rather than an historical inquiry, this book is Malaparte’s personal record of appalling social upheaval, his own interpretation of the terrible suffering meted out by fate.

‘We were clean, tidy and well fed, Jack and I, as we made our way through the midst of the dreadful Neapolitan mob — squalid, dirty, ragged, starving, jostled and insulted in all the languages and dialects of the world by troops of soldiers belonging to the Armies of Liberation, which were drawn from all the races of the earth. The distinction of being the first amongst all the peoples of Europe to be liberated had fallen to the people of Naples; and in celebration of the winning of so well-deserved a prize my poor beloved Neapolitans, after three years of hunger, epidemics and savage air attacks, had accepted gracefully and patriotically the longed-for and coveted honour of playing the part of a conquered people, of singing, clapping, jumping for joy amid the ruins of their houses, unfurling foreign flags which until the day before had been the emblems of their foes, and throwing flowers from their windows on to the heads of the conquerors.’ p9